A Maasai man walks into a bank in NAIROBI and asks for the loan officer. He tells the loan officer that he is going to DUBAI on business for four weeks and needs to borrow 5,000.
The bank officer tells him that bank will need some form of security for the loan, so the maasai manhands over the keys to a brand new Mercedes Benz S class 500 parked on the street in front of the bank. Produces the log book and everything checks out.
The loan officer agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan. The bank’s president and its officers all enjoy a good laugh at the maasai for using a KSH 15 Million Mercedes Benz as collateral against a 5,000 loan.
An employee of the bank then drives the Mercedes Benz into the bank’s underground garage and parks it there. Four weeks later, the maasai returns, repays the 5,000 and the interest, which comes to 150.41.
The loan officer says 'Sir, we are very happy to have had your business & this transaction has worked out very nicely but we are a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you out & found that you are a multi millionaire.
What puzzles us is, why would you bother to borrow 5,000 The Masai man replies: 'Where else in NAIROBI can I park my car four weeks for only 150.41 and expect it to be there when I return.
Back around 1982, a Japanese gentleman who worked for Sumitomo, a company which I had not heard of, requested purchasing four NEC personal computers by borrowing the money and I turned it over to a loan broker my firm dealt with.
She called me back later that day and asked if the guy was “for real”? I said I thought so and asked why she was questioning it - was he not credit-worthy? No, that wasn’t it. Sumitomo, it turned out, was a $30 billion dollar business with 75,000 employees. They owned 50% of NEC (the brand of equipment they were buying) and their bank was the Sumitomo Bank. She was wondering why the heck he needed a loan to buy the equipment. I said she was asking too many questions and if their was nothing wrong with his paperwork, just give the guy a loan. (She did).
The world is a strange place. For a period of about a year, our largest customer for Qume 8 inch floppy disk drives (yes, these really did exist) was the Qume Corporation and our largest customer for the PC’s of one NEC division was the PC division of another of their divisions.
My condo association is a very large one. There is a very good golf course running up through it and a clubhouse. There are the association fees and a district tax. That much is easy. But the two have one paying the other rent for the clubhouse. Even though the association has long paid off the clubhouse. It keeps it honest for tax and costing purposes. But drunks at the bar hate it. Why not drink for less money? As opposed to paying rent to ourselves.